Aportación de la UE:

Coordinado en:

Tema(s):

Convocatoria de propuestas:

Régimen de financiación:

IRG - Marie Curie actions-International re-integration grants

Objetivo

The use of the human hand plays a central role in human motor behaviour. Several specialized areas in the pre-motor and parietal cortex play a dominant role for the high-level preparation of hand movements, which involves the transformation of visual information and volitional signals into motor plans that can be readily executed. The capacity to plan hand movements is preserved, even if the neural pathway to execute these motor signals is disrupted, like in patients with spinal cord injury or stroke, where neural commands can no longer reach the hand. We propose to investigate in non-human primates how these hand-planning signals could be read out and interpreted for the control of a prosthetic hand.

In Aim 1, we will investigate the fundamental operation and interaction of two specific brain areas, the anterior intra-parietal area (AIP) in the parietal cortex and the area F5 in the ventral pre-motor cortex that both generate early hand grasping instructions. We will record spiking activity and local field potentials (LFPs) simultaneously from both areas while animals perform a delayed grasping task, in which objects can be grasped with either a precision grip or a power grip and in 5 different hand orientations. By correlating the neural responses with each other and with the animal's behaviour, we will determine how high-order grasping plans are encoded in AIP and F5 and how these areas interact to generate grasping movements.

In Aim 2, we will continuously read out and decode these high-level grasping signals for the control of a robotic hand. We will permanently implant up to 100 recording electrodes in AIP and F5 and continuously record spiking activity and LFPs to predict the animal's plan to grasp, which will be used to control a simple robotic hand. This pro of concept, that high-level grasping signals can control a robotic hand, will bring us several steps closer to the ultimate goal of restoring limb control in paralysed patients.